Hugh Bailey: Help for ex-offenders pays off

Published 6:32 pm, Friday, February 22, 2013

On the one hand, you can be "tough on crime." As an alternative, you could support policies to actually reduce crime. Doing the first does not necessarily lead to the second.

Being "tough on crime" generally means pushing policies like longer prison sentences and mandatory minimums. It also, less explicitly, means doing little for people who have completed their sentences and are trying to work their way back into society. If you're going to be tough on crime, this amounts to coddling criminals, even if they have served their debt.

It's this kind of attitude that makes time spent in prison a life sentence, following an ex-offender everywhere, removing opportunities and helping push them back to the lifestyle that got them in trouble in the first place.

To some observers, that's just fine -- don't commit crimes if you don't want these problems. To everyone else, who would prefer solutions to tough talk, there ought to be ways we can do better.

The Bridgeport Re-Entry Roundtable is a group that provides services for returning prisoners. It offers a network of support to help integrate ex-offenders back into the community, with a focus on job placement.

From one perspective, it's about offering a second chance to people the rest of society would just as soon forget about. Phrased a different way, its job is to cut spending and fight crime.

Experience has shown the biggest obstacle to reintegration is employment. People who get out of prison and find jobs are much less likely to end up back behind bars.

It costs tens of thousands of dollars to keep someone locked up. That's public money. If we want to cut spending, we should want fewer people in prison. And if helping ex-offenders cuts recidivism, that means improved public safety.

America, statistics show, just loves to put people in prison. No other rich country in the world comes close to our incarceration rate, which has skyrocketed in recent decades. At the same time, violent crime has plummeted.

But there's also a growing understanding that our love affair with prisons is unsustainable. It is prohibitively expensive, and no one can afford to just keep building jails. It's also a policy that perpetuates poverty, helping keep millions of people and their families on the fringes of society.

In Connecticut, the momentum is behind cutting the prison population and eliminating the harsh sentences that often do more harm than good. Even so, there is no shortage of prisoners.

Resources are scarce everywhere, and the state is looking at billion-dollar deficits. But this is a case where spending now means saving soon. It is unquestionably more expensive to incarcerate ex-prisoners than it is to help them stay out.

Still, it can be a tough sell, even for people inclined to be sympathetic. Wraparound services, job-placement assistance -- that's all great, but where is the help for people who don't have a record? Do you need to go to prison to get some assistance?

In fact, there is help available for all, through agencies like Career Resources, a key component of the roundtable. Assistance with re-entry is only part of what these organizations do.

Ideally, we'd put more money into keeping people out of prison from the beginning. But there are ex-offenders getting out every day, and it's in everyone's interest to see that they get some help.

Funding for several aspects of the Bridgeport re-entry program has been eliminated in Governor Malloy's budget proposal. Lawmakers need to see that the money is put back in.